Susan Ramsey

30 August 2016
Instructional Design
Week One
Course Analysis
Course description (What is this course about? 1-2 paragraphs as if
you would read in a course catalog, highlighting the main outcomes.)
The Silk Road represents not one, but numerous ancient trading routes
used from 500 BCE with the Persian Royal Road through 1453 CE when
the Ottoman Empire closed the routes. Trade involved products such
as silk, paper, and spices, but perhaps more importantly, these trade
routes allowed the interchange of culture including art, religion,
language, and science. This course examines the interaction of
multiple religions on the Silk Road. We will study the religious
interactions between Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Islam,
Christianity, and Manichaeism. Students will investigate the ways that
these religions shaped each other throughout their journey on the Silk
Road. They will also seek to discover useful strategies and approaches
that might foster interfaith dialogue in our pluralistic context. The
course will utilize a variety of materials to examine this vast subject:
primary texts, art, architecture, and music.
Students (Generally describe your learners. What do you know about
them that might influence how you design a course? Consider age,
gender, education, comfort with technology, reading ability and
language, work/family.)
Students who take the course are usually non-majors, who take the
course to fulfill their second Religion requirement along with the Global
Heritage requirement. Last semester there were 16 women and 11
men in the course, all were of traditional college age. Their majors
varied with the highest proportion being in business (including
marketing and finance), another contingent were education majors,
there were a few music and theatre majors, and a few in the Asian
Studies program. Overall, the students are very comfortable with
technology. Their reading ability ranged from fair to excellent. Most of
the students had many extracurricular commitments including sports,
Greek life, work, and music/theatre groups. About 1/3 were
commuters, and 2/3 lived on campus.
Delivery (How will this be delivered? Online or Blended?)

Blended. Because my commute is so long, Id love to persuade the

Provost to allow me to drive in on Tuesdays and teach in person, but
then run the class remotely on Thursdays, although students would
have flexibility as to when they would work on the assignments and
content for Thursday. Eventually, Id like to teach online but for now
Im in a traditional classroom with a decent learning management
system (Janzen e-Learning) that could be used in a more optimal way.
What challenges do you anticipate?
I taught this course for the first time last spring and I plan to teach it
again in spring 2017. The course needs a lot of revision and
reorganization. I also need to narrow down the main topics because
the way I taught it the first time there was too much content for
students to master.
I also think designing an online course and/or blended course will be
very different from planning for a face-to-face course. I was
encouraged to learn that my teaching style fits the online model in
terms of wanting to provide resources for students and expecting that
they will take significant responsibility for deepening their learning.
One challenge for me is finding resources that arent too challenging
for them to use. For example, I found tremendous books and articles
through our college library, but the students sometimes said that they
needed a PhD to understand them. Finding the right balance between
content and reading level is important.